Last ocean swim before Alcatraz

Today was my last ocean swim before the triathlon... just two weeks away. Mom came down and watched, partly because she was nervous about me swimming in the ocean alone. Before we left, I sampled a GU gel pack and nearly puked. I'll not be trying that on race day. I wanted at least 45 minutes of swimming or roughly the distance I'll be swimming on May 2. Big C was very choppy today, making for San Francisco-like conditions. We went down to the beach around 9 a.m., and surprisingly there were hardly any swimmers there. I made sure to go overboard on the body glide today so I could practice getting my wet suit off afterward. At the life guard tower, Mom stated snapping pics with her cell phone of me getting ready. Then I jumped in the water and she started power walking along the shoreline.
It's about 500 yards to go down and back along the buoy line. I wanted to practice longer reps, so after a 250 yard swim out from shore, I swam 4 x the buoy line (or 4 x 500 yards). The first two were a bit of a mess, and I had a hard time getting a rhythm in the ocean. It was still very choppy and the sun was glaring in my eyes as I headed south so I had a hard time sighting and zig-zagged all over the place. The second two were much better and faster. The unofficial splits for the four reps were 8:38, 8:45, 8:20, 8:15. I definitely got in a groove on the last two and tried to push it a little more. I probably could have done one more lap, but decided 45 minutes between warm up and cool down would suffice. After I swam back into shore, I took off the top half of my suit and ran about 400 yards to simulate the transition (is about a 1200 yard run out of the water to the transition area for my tri), which went ok, but I was a little disoriented and wasn't running too fast.

Mom snapped a few more pictures as I cleaned up and we headed home for a nice bowl of oatmeal. I decided to delay today's run until this afternoon to give my legs a few more hours to recover from yesterday. If not, I'll go longer tomorrow.

(5 hours later...) Energized by the Laker win, I ran easy 7 down to Crytsal Cove and back. Nothing too special. 40 miles for the week, 7500 yards in the pool, 55 miles on the bike.